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by kbos87 1520 days ago
I’m a sample of one, but I’ll offer two things that have made a huge difference for me.

#1 - 5-ish years ago I used an alarm clock app that would require me to get out of bed and take a picture of an object in my house away from the bedroom (I chose my microwave), then complete a puzzle, then review goals I had written down in order to turn the alarm off.

I probably used the app for 6 months and I have to say it absolutely and permanently changed my behavior.

#2 - I had an epiphany about how my diet affects my sleep. I still have a lot to learn about this but the casual observation that eating a big meal too close to bedtime, high salt meals, and anything that could lead to heartburn can wreck a night for me. It sounds obvious now but I was going through my life not having really acknowledged this.

All in all, I do think my difficulty was mostly that I was a little tired in the AM and prone to making excuses and hitting snooze… my sleep habits were otherwise ok to good.

If you’re in a similar situation, I’d try paying attention to the link between your diet and sleep (even if you don’t think the link is there!) and finding something that forces you over that hump of initial work of getting out of bed. Once you’ve had to run to your kitchen to shut your alarm clock off and jumped through a few mental hoops, you’ve already gone through much of the trouble of getting out of bed.

1 comments

#1 sounds like Alarmy. It's a really useful app that I still use today. There is a wake-up check function that silently asks if you are awake up to 3 minutes after completing your mission, to help prevent you from going back to sleep. If not, it infinitely continues the alarm cycle.
That was it! Couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was called.